One of the toughest contracts I have had to navigate in my musical career that now marks a fairly significant milestone, was something I could not have managed without a coach who has absolutely nothing to do with the music industry.

That would be a strange enough sentence on its own. The trouble is that it describes my whole life.

The mentor who taught me the most about ‘jazz’ during my jazz piano program as a young 20 something ‘fresh-off the-boat’ immigrant was not a pianist. He was a trumpet player.

The person who taught me the most about composition, a discipline one might reasonably assume begins with harmony and orchestration, was a Latin percussionist who had not finished high school, in a country where nobody knew what Latin percussion was.

I learnt Konnokol, the now well-known South Asian rhythmic language, from a Liberian-German bass player.

And the teacher who eventually helped me make peace with my heritage and my third-culture-kid identity comes from a culture whose place in the history of mine is, technically, that of the coloniser.

Very little of the answers have arrived through the doors I have spent considerable quantities of time standing in front of, expecting them to.

The people who have changed my life rarely carried the title I would have searched for. And I seem find myself recognising a pattern where the value of what they taught me lay precisely in the fact that they did not.

Living out of sequence

For the longest time, none of this felt like a blessing, just disorientation.

For so many of my peers, there seemed to exist what felt like a sequence available.

Grow up in your neighbourhood, go through the regular adoloscent crises, figure it out in your 20’s travelling to find out what you wanted to ‘study’. Study that, or not, found a community within the thing based on the ones you grew up amidst, and gradually learn how to explain it all as your story to the rest of the world and make peace withe what follows in the name of growing older and ‘settling down’. Ideally with a few people endorsing the entire endeavour in the forms of partners, friends, peers and family.

My trajectory on the other hand, felt like a chaos of moving parts that would move sideways on some days, far away into the horizon into others as I tried to figure out if I should chase or duck. 

My childhood didn’t lead to my education neatly, my education did not lead neatly into my career, my career refused to settle into a single description.

The places I grew up in refused to add up to an identity uncomplicated enough for the regular passer-by looking for small-talk and the circle back to the starting point didn’t necessarily feel like the hero’s journey, but a massive question mark around if it was just back to square one, and just that.

Even my body was on the wrong timeline. At 21 I looked 45, weighed 110 kilos and couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without gasping and had already spent a week in an intensive care unit with heart disease at a time I was supposed to be out partying before ‘growing up’ was the next task on the to-do list. A couple of planned exits from the matrix attempted made the entire equation even more befuddling to many parts of me.

At 40, on the other hand, I got my first six-pack. No medication, no surgery, just sheer stubbornness and a middle finger raised relentlessly at skeptics insisting it impossible for men with my constitution and genes.

Just to be clear, I mention this not as a prescription or as blanket argument against social norms, medicine or education systems. It is simply an honest observation of parts of my life that refused to happen in the accepted order. Observations I have always felt a sense of fear sharing openly for most of my adult life.

Music led me into psychology, psychology led me back into the body, teaching changed the way I performed, and cultures I had no ancestral claim to gave me language for parts of myself that my own cultures had left unresolved.

And so, I find myself feeling wary of imposing a tidy story on years that felt anything but tidy while inside them. What I am more confident about instead, is the persistent feeling that I was doing life the wrong way, despite plenty of evidence that a lot of it was working.

Reading the same life differently

It is only recently that I have considered examining this apparent lack of order as a gift.

The facts didn’t necessarily change right after by default. But what did was the meaning I had assigned to each. [1]

None of this means everything can or should be ‘thought’ away. Or that every experience can be reframed as something positive. Sometimes anger is accurate in being directed to the atrocities we bear witness to without consent on so many levels. Sometimes grief needs to remain grief and there is no rear exit.

But reappraisal in my experience can be valuable despite for a different reason:

the first meaning we give an experience is rarely the only truthful one available.

What the reframes over the years did for me were fairly specific. A life that never respected categories taught me, not always gently, to have a second look for unassuming substance in corners where the packaging made little sense at first.

It made it difficult to confuse a title with wisdom, a qualification with insight or familiarity with truth. And it left me unable to build myself from one single school of thought, a single professional culture or a single inherited idea of who I was supposed to be. [2]

Which is perhaps why the sameness I hear everywhere now is so hard for me to ignore.

The great flattening

Every email I open. Every social media post I scroll past. Every sales page promising transformation, and every supposedly vulnerable confession moving through the same rehearsed arc of rupture, revelation and redemption. Even the people disagreeing with one another seem to do it in the same vocabulary, the same cadence and the same handful of conclusions.

Then there’s the role AI has had to play in this. It is near-heartbreaking how much inspiration, hope and motivation I have lost while following the work of people I once looked up to. The words that carried precious traces of the lives they had lived I’d hang onto seem to have morphed into a numbed oblivion to the obviousness of the lazy ChatGPT prompt generating an accepted successor.

Blaming AI alone feels too convenient to me personally, however. The appetite for templates, certainty, extraction and unethical capitalism with human emotion as normalized collateral damage. AI did not invent branding (that started on farms, btw), or the insertion of a human as a market category.

It arrived in a culture that had already spent years teaching people to find gaps in society, create one if necessary, and sell a solution that was never needed in the first place.

Rinse and repeat.

The technology has now given that machinery an entirely new capacity to scale the machinery.

What we lose when we hand over the story

Here is where the personal and the artistic meet.

The story through which we interpret a life eventually becomes part of the machinery with which we create.

I have conducted many a thought-experiment on how things might have gone if I had interpreted the lack of linear sequence in my life as evidence of the failure I continue to look over my shoulder to check for on a bad day.

The temptation to borrow someone else’s timeline, vocabulary and definition of progress, seeking credentials to reassure me rather than change me.

The precise posture where X starts to sound Y. And Y like X.

The flattening does not restrict itself to words. When we surrender the interpretation of our lives to identical professional categories, cultural scripts, online templates and machines, we lose contact with the one lens nobody else could have supplied.

Our own.

The peculiar, inconvenient, messy and completely unrepeatable sequence through which we became ourselves.

Art depends on this.

A phrase encountered in a metropolitan on a horn in one continent surfaces in a piano vocabulary years later on another. Perspective familiarized in therapy changes how I stand onstage years later. A conversation with a mentor who knows little about music-business but holds four black belts changes how a musician negotiates a contract.

This is the kind of cross-pollination through which a voice becomes a voice and not an echo.

Most of contemporary creative culture seems intent on reversing it. We are told to study the people doing what we want to do, follow their systems, analyse their content and produce our own version fast enough to stay visible.

Musicians follow musicians, coaches follow coaches, writers study the posts of writers who are studying the same posts, and everybody ends up trained on everybody else’s output while fewer people are willing to disappear into an experience long enough to find out what it actually does to them.

Influence has always been inevitable. But what we are living through is something else: compression. 

Narrower references, safer language, more fear, contradictions edited out until even our attempts at ‘individuality’ resemble one another as another carousel teaches us how to be ‘authentic’ on platforms that know so much more about us than we realize and use it to every profit left to be gained, qualmlessly.

And just to make sure I’m being ‘fair’ it feels pertinent to add that sounding different for its own sake solves nothing. Obscure references, unusual clothes and provocative opinions is another well-established uniform and strategy you can now get yourself a degree in.

Incoherence, despite alternate marketing approaches, is not evidence of depth.

To the best of my experience, a distinct voice does not come from elaborate strategy to appear unlike the rest. I shouldn’t generalize, but in my case, they emerged when I stopped treating parts of my life that do not fit well as branding as the most noteworthy information to explore deeper.

My work eneded up sounding the way it does because my life refused to respect categories that satisfied most cultural narratives. I am a musician whose understanding of music has been shaped by psychology, physical practice, migration, entrepreneurship, grief, pedagogy and years of trying to make sense of a nervous system that did not always feel safe.

My teachers have been conservatory professors, vice-presidents of European music councils, high-school dropouts, martial-artists, yogis, and the noisy backstages of stages that can range from rooms with VIP access only, or an open invitation for the drunken brawl that was the weekly patron of my first regular, paid engagement as a professional musician.

Remove the contradictions and I might get something a lot easier to explain, but would no longer be mine.

That’s when I would sound like someone else.

Everyone else.

That, in the end, is what worries me most about the arts eco-system today. Not just the predictability of the words, but that the unmarketable, unrelated, out-of-sequence parts of people’s lives disappearing from what they make.